While we all live through this nightmare, remember one important thing

It did NOT have to happen.

It was entirely avoidable.

Even with the Russians on the ground on election day flipping votes and millions of minority voters being turned away or not having their votes counted, it was still very easy to win this simply by NOT attacking our own candidate constantly.

33. Yeah, let's hope we can find someone strong enough to win by more than 4 or 5 million votes.

A popular vote win of only 2.9 M votes is pretty pathetic. And no more excuses about gerrymandering and voter suppression of millions more votes -- we need someone a lot more qualified than a former Secretary of State and Senator.

3. I didn't know a single Democrat during the entire election period who ever

attacked our candidate. I knew a lot of Hillary supporters and a lot of Bernie supporters. Once Hillary won the primary, I never hear a single attack on her from anyone. Everyone knew how important it was that she should win.

"If you must vote for a woman, vote for an actual feminist like Jill" And one who said she was phone banking for HRC, but reposted articles on FB from Kushner's zine attacking HRC during the general (Clinton campaign takes $10 a month out of elderly woman's bank account every month) and crap from the Intercept, because she so wanted her anger and disappointment about the primaries to be validated.

Others would totally say that they would "hold their nose and vote for HRC, but hey, what about this over here that shows I was right about her all along, she threatened Bernie's family when she called them by name at the convention, and did you hear what she said about Bill's accusers to her friend back in the 90's? Well I haven't heard much that's less feminist than that... I just hope that all of you that crowned her the candidate will be happy if Trump gets elected." and so on. From the convention on.

All those "I don't have pnuemonia" memes with Bernie's photo, and all those petitions demanding that she step down and let Bernie take her place ALL over FB. The rabid feeding frenzy when Comey's letter came out - the barely disguised GLEE in the "I'm concerned about this awful revelation about Hillary" concern trolling her on DU.

8. Thank you (nt)

11. Please remember

A really HUGE amount of that "attacking" was done by Russians. I am sure -- absolutely positive -- that a lot of people here and elsewhere don't really appreciate the sheer magnitude of these attacks. They were done by people on behalf of Russia who had extremely good English skills and posed as Americans, like a housewife from Idaho.

Very adept, skilled, manipulative, extraordinarily capable under their covers.

Some of them may have even been here -- how could we know for sure without a thorough forensic investigation??

They were all over Facebook, and they were all over Twitter. And they got millions upon millions of views, and no doubt persuaded many. All they had to do with push people in the direction they may have been leaning to start with.

So don't be so hard on your fellow Dems. Sure, some of them are guilty and deserve blame. But -- there was SO much going on that overshadowed that. Really.

And then there were other factors as well:

pnwmom:Hillary didn't lose because she was less POPULAR. She lost because of James Comey's letters and because of some even more important factors -- more important because they're not going away. They will be used against us in every election going forward, unless we can stop them.

The big problems are voter suppression, Russian meddling, and targeted voter propaganda through Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other forms of social media. There is no question that the Trump campaign, through Cambridge Analytica, did this -- and that the Russians did this. The only question is how much they conspired together in the propaganda campaign.

The most commonly posited explanation of Donald Trump’s shocking election victory was that every professional pollster in the nation – despite each working independently and using differing methodologies – somehow managed to overlook the same pockets of Trump voters in these states. If such pockets did exist, they would have existed in varying sizes in each of the four states, thus resulting in different sized wins in each.

Ask any statistician and they’ll tell you that a reasonable distribution of the results would have been Trump winning one of the states by one percent, won one of them by perhaps three percent, won one of them by two percent, lost one of them by one percent, or something along those lines. But instead the voting tallies looked startlingly different from any natural distribution. In fact they looked startlingly the same.

According to the New York Times, the voting results broke down like this: Trump won Florida by just over one percent of the vote. He also won Pennsylvania by just over one percent. He won Michigan by just under one percent. And he won Wisconsin by precisely one percent. That’s not how numbers tend to work in the real world.

On its own, this kind of suspiciously consistent numerical dispersion across the four states that decided the election would be something that could be written off as a mere fluke. But when you put it within the context of the numerous other ways in which the voting tallies make no mathematical sense, it points to the numbers having been rigged or altered.

16. Holy shit that's just not true.

It's everywhere, every Democratic candidate of note has remarked about this.

Not much they can do in the Red States. It's the nature of our construction, and a mistake. Elections must from this point forward be considered a matter of national security.

Really, everyone from Warren to Harris to Sanders to Clinton to Newsome to Brown -- everyone has strongly urged serious action be taken. The DNC called for a ban on electronic machines and tabulators before 2018.

It's not a matter of silence. The NSA knows what happened, clearly, from Reality Winner's leak. We all know. The problem is the same problem that prevents any action on any issue -- GOP control, and the use of that control to gain more control. They don't care about norms or people or the founding documents or the future.

19. I have a Democratic Congressman and two Democratis Senators as well

as a Democratic Governor, and I have heard nothing from any of them. None of my Democratic state reps either. My state has a law that all polling places have to offer an electronic voting option even if they are using paper ballots.

California was rescued by the excellent SOS Debra Bowen, who replaced a GOP Diebold shill. I was at a hearing where as an assemblywoman she grilled the GOP SOS's lackey, William Wood. It was the most embarassing display of naked political primitivism I have ever seen; his answers ranged from nonsensical to pure mockery, and he surrounded himself with a little herd of GOP beta males for moral support.

She eviscerated and humiliated him. He was ignorant, utterly ignorant, and I swear she started glowing like an elf queen near the end. Brilliant woman.

She ran for SOS and won a few years later, and electronic voting died in California. Our exit polls match the totals, unlike any of the red states.

I agree, we should all be saying it every day. It's the Core Issue of any Democracy.

37. Could you please tell us which state that is so we can add our voices to yours? nt

40. California. Up north in wine country.

We are a paper ballot county up here. There is a state law that requires us to have at least one electronic voting device at each precinct and to inform voters it is available if they choose to use it. I worked at the polls for about five years, maybe 6 or 8 elections and saw a grand total of two people use it. And one of those times the operator couldn't get it to work.

I've never researched it, but I would not be surprised if the manufacturer of those machine lobbied for the law to require them at every polling place.

14. Thanks for that point.

Democratic Underground was attacked by a foreign military-grade operation, just like the DNC and RNC and the Department of Defense and multiple other federal and state agencies. We know what they wanted; we know how they did most of it, even though the proof is not yet public.

Someone opposed to hand-counted paper ballots with rigorous multi-party observation and an instant and free recount process is helping the Russians harm the United States of America, period, end of story, that's how history will judge it.

27. I live in Dumbfuckistan, though it was blue for many years

Because of unions and coal mining.

I did work in the election for Clinton, though I voted for Sanders in the primary. Unless you live here, you can’t believe the vitriolic hate for her. The usual Democratic Party workers did not come out, I was just about it, and women voters hated her as much or more than men. I know, I spoke to hundreds of them. The guy they sent in from Washington DC to run the campaign knew nothing about the area and was pulled shortly before the election to work somewhere they thought they could win.

You need to realize how much of this country is Mississippi. A successful candidate must have at least some Cledus appeal or we will have another Trump.

45. I still think the over the top Bernie Bros were Russian posers

Bernie Sanders was supportive of Hillary Clinton. Every last Democrat I know got behind her. I seriously suspect that the harshest and most persistent anti-Clinton voices on the self professed left were hostile foreign agents.